However, practically speaking, the training on offer might not be directly relevant to the businesses or jobs that these professionals are performing on a daily basis.

For example, CPA Australia might offer a seminar on understanding wealth management in the accounting context. Although that knowledge is relevant to a CPA in general, it might not be suited to someone handling internal audit for a manufacturing entity.

That means the business that employs the professional doesn’t directly benefit from the training that is delivered to him. Often, it also means that professionals often end up attending sessions that they’re not entirely interested in.

CPD requirements are a great thing, in any case, primarily because it ensures that professionals adopt an agile mindset — which is key to succeeding in today’s disruptive marketplace.

HR professionals can team up with AI to help

Human resource (HR) professionals perform a number of tasks. One of those is to ensure that companies provide the right kind of training to all staff.

The first step, however, is to identify the gaps in knowledge and prioritize the training needs identified based on priorities of the business. For businesses with maybe up to 50 employees, this task is easy to do for a human executive.

Further, today’s employees expect a more tailored focus on their career when it comes to receiving training, which makes the job of HR professionals at some of the larger organizations that much more difficult.

As a result, HR professionals have now started using AI to identify and prioritize training needs — and also deliver more personalized training sessions that not only suit the existing workflow of each employee but also prepares them for their chosen career path within the organization.

Better understanding the role of AI in training

The basis for AI is data, and organizations typically have plenty of it when it comes to their employees. They know the qualifications and past experiences of each of their employees, have copies of their appraisals, and know what career path they’re on.

This data makes it easy for a simple AI model to help HR professionals identify the learning needs of all the employees within the organization (after removing overlaps in courses if any).

Although the idea to use AI in identifying learning needs sounds novel, it isn’t. It’s just an evolution of the “people analytics” programs that HR leaders have been trying to build.

Once training needs have been identified, the team can work with a learning partner or the company’s official training partners to create content that the AI model has identified.

When the content is ready, it can be delivered to each executive via an AI-powered learning management system (LMS) that not only optimizes the content for viewing on all kinds of devices but also ensures that each professional is tested and certified once a module in a course is completed.

The use of an LMS is key when we talk about HR professionals gearing up to provide smarter training.

To many, contact-programmes and face to face learning is critical to delivering a good training session. However, HR professionals must realize that in today’s digital world, training needs to be digital too. According to recent surveys, employees seem better engaged when offered digital and on-demand training opportunities.

Further, when content creators and companies reach out to professional qualification governing bodies with learning outcome plans and samples of what is being offered to employees, the training is likely to get their stamp of approval as well — allowing employees to earn CPD credits for undergoing internal training.

At the end of the day, the ideal scenario is for HR professionals to use AI to identify knowledge gaps and offer personalized training via AI and smart LMS solutions. That’s the future that businesses must work towards as regulators across the APAC emphasize the need for upskilling and retraining across the length and breadth of organizations.